Longing for the Bomb: Oak Ridge and Atomic Nostalgia
Lindsey A. Freeman
Abstract
Tucked into the folds of Appalachia and kept off all commercial maps, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was created for the Manhattan Project by the U.S. government in the 1940s. The city has experienced the entire lifespan of the Atomic Age, from the fevered wartime enrichment of the uranium that fueled Little Boy, through a brief period of atomic utopianism after World War II when it began to brand itself as “The Atomic City,” to the anxieties of the Cold War, to the contradictory contemporary period of nuclear unease and atomic nostalgia. This book shows how a once-secret city is visibly caught in an u ... More
Tucked into the folds of Appalachia and kept off all commercial maps, Oak Ridge, Tennessee, was created for the Manhattan Project by the U.S. government in the 1940s. The city has experienced the entire lifespan of the Atomic Age, from the fevered wartime enrichment of the uranium that fueled Little Boy, through a brief period of atomic utopianism after World War II when it began to brand itself as “The Atomic City,” to the anxieties of the Cold War, to the contradictory contemporary period of nuclear unease and atomic nostalgia. This book shows how a once-secret city is visibly caught in an uncertain present, no longer what it was historically yet still clinging to the hope of a nuclear future. It is a place where history, memory, and myth compete and conspire to tell the story of America’s atomic past and to explain the nuclear present.
Keywords:
Appalachia,
Oak Ridge,
Tennessee,
Manhattan Project,
Atomic Age,
Little Boy,
Cold War
Bibliographic Information
Print publication date: 2015 |
Print ISBN-13: 9781469622378 |
Published to North Carolina Scholarship Online: January 2016 |
DOI:10.5149/northcarolina/9781469622378.001.0001 |